Blockbuster Film Quotes

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.

Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.

About 20 years ago I told an Exec to tell her friend, an Exec at a big entertainment company that they should develop a video library where anyone can pull up a film or tv show when they want to, from home. This was before Video On Demand. Before Netflix went streaming. Before Amazon Video and Hulu. That entertainment company I told about my vision for a VOD-type of service to was Blockbuster. But because I was a very young Executive, a woman, and Asian; they didn't listen. Look where Blockbuster is now. - Don't take Good Advice for Granted. Futurist - Kailin Gow

Rat je jako dobar film. Fino su ga režirali, svatko sebi piše scenarij i to na licu mjesta pa iz gleda uvjerljivije, strani su ulagači u njega gurnuli velike pare, glumaca na svakom koraku, a i pozera. Nema kaskadera, nema dublera, i kad god i kako god na kraju završio, na njemu će se još godinama dobro zarađivati.

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

I've never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind. I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not.

Even Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.

Who wants to go to the theater and watch a bunch of people speaking in Chinese for two hours? I mean, wouldn’t you go see a Chinese film instead? We’re talking about a blockbuster made with an American audience in mind. Accessibility matters.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars. But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all. To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want to get ahead. The truth is, you don’t. If you love and want to make movies about issues of social import, get your hands on Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network. Read it. Then watch the movie. Then read it again. If you love and want to make big blockbusters that also have great artistic merit, do the same thing with Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark screenplay and the movie made from it. Think about how the screenplays made you feel. And how the movies built from these screenplays did or didn’t hit you the same way. […] This sounds basic, right? That’s because it is basic. And it’s true. All the information you need is the movies and screenplays you love. And in the books you’ve read and the relationships you’ve had and your ability to use those things.

My work is part detective, part cultural anthropologist. I am a spy, a researcher, a negotiator, a trendsetter, a socialite, and a dealmaker. This is the reason I own this one-man niche. I supply the world with the most brilliant stories in adrenaline-packed adventures concocted by writers, stalkers, hackers, and odd characters, and then produced and marketed by heads of studios and publishers who come to me with preemptive offers. I have the power to turn someone’s obscure dream into one hundred TV episodes, then syndication. I can find a screenplay written in film school and turn it into a blockbuster.

I always loved Woolworth’s because of the pick ’n’ mix; the memory of all those cola bottles, cherry lips, and flying saucers still makes me smile. Lily’s favorite shops were Our Price, where she went to buy the latest cassettes and music posters, and Tammy Girl and C&A, where she and Rose shopped for clothes. I always enjoyed our trips to Blockbuster Video—even if I was rarely allowed to choose which film we would rent—and visits to the little independent bookshop with Nana were my favorite outings. Buying books was the only form of shopping she ever enjoyed. It makes me sad to realize that none of those shops exist now. So many high streets are more like ghost towns these days.

Terrell, Paul, 66–67, 68 Tesler, Larry, 96–97, 99, 114, 120, 136, 301 Tevanian, Avadis “Avie,” xvi, 259, 268, 272–74, 300–301, 303, 308–9, 362, 366, 458–59, 461 textbook industry, 509–10, 554 “There Goes My Love” (song), 498 “Things Have Changed” (song), 412 “Think Different” advertising campaign, vii, xviii, 328–32, 358 original Jobs version, 577 Thomas, Brent, 162 Thomas, Dylan, 19 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 235 Thurman, Mrs., 12 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 119 Tiffany, Louis, 123 Time, xvii, xviii, 90, 166, 218, 290, 323, 381, 383, 429, 473, 495, 504, 506 SJ profiled by, 106–7, 139–41 Time Inc., 330, 473, 478, 504, 506–7 Time-Life Pictures, 330 “Times They Are A-Changing, The” (Dylan), 168, 207 Time Warner, 506 Tin Toy (film), 248 Toshiba, 385, 386 touchscreens, 93 Toy Story (film), 285–91, 305, 311, 372, 373–74, 427, 428, 430, 434, 437, 472, 565 basic idea for, 285–86 blockbuster success of, 290–91 budgeting of, 288

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.

căuta la nesfârşit în textul Coranului sursa violenţelor e la fel de neproductiv cu a căuta-o în nesfârşitele măceluri din Vechiul Testament (text de altminteri acceptat şi de musulmani) sau în Iliada, blockbuster mai sângeros decât orice film de la Holywood.

It was other studios, however, that were most damaged by Feige’s success. Why, their corporate bosses wanted to know, couldn’t they be as successful as Marvel? Of course other studios had hits, but nobody was pumping out two surefire blockbusters per year (soon to be three) like Marvel, with nary a flop in the bunch. Even the movies that clearly weren’t as good as the rest, like the second Avengers film, seemed to get a pass from audiences and critics, engendering no small amount of bitterness throughout the rest of Hollywood. “Marvel could have made a movie about someone picking his nose and it would have been 98 on Rotten Tomatoes,” complained Arad, who as a producer of Sony’s Spider-Man films now competed with his former employer.

Four years earlier, Weissmuller had been the first to break the one-minute barrier in the 100-meter freestyle. (That he would later go on to play Tarzan in MGM’s blockbuster films and become an international movie star of the era is also worthy of note.)

I’ve been asked many times why and how do Steven and George make popular, blockbuster films. My answer is twofold: They know how to pick what the audience wants to see, and the creative part of their films is made by one or two people, not committees.

For years my inevitable conclusion has been that the films of the seventh art are beautiful, powerful and soporific, and that blockbuster movies are pointless, very moving and immensely satisfying.

The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on the night of April fourteenth 1912, and sank in the North Atlantic waters in the wee hours of the following morning. She took more than 1,500 souls with her. While this death toll is devastating, it is by no means the greatest at-sea catastrophe in western history. Even besides wartime disasters, the explosion of the Mont-Blanc in Nova Scotia killed almost two thousand in 1917, the 1707 Sicily Naval Disaster killed almost the same number of people, and several other shipwrecks with smaller death tolls were arguably more dramatic. Yet fascination with the Titanic has persisted since she rested on the ocean floor, long before James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster film. Why?

Building a Blockbuster How to write compelling content that sells The term “blockbuster” has unsettling military origins, but is now used to mean a film that has blown the box office away. It usually has high production costs and budget, but (hopefully) earns it all back and more with ticket sales. Blockbusters are usually BIG movies, large in scope, scale, and budget. They tell a big story, and reach a big audience. They’re also usually “high concept,” meaning that they can be described in a single sentence. (The most famous high concept pitch was for the movie Alien which they pitched as, “Jaws in space.”)

On the first day of the war, a friend of mine texted me: ‘What is happening in Gaza?’ I replied: ‘The proper question is not what is happening, but what has been happening, all this time—for more than 75 years.’ We live in a war film, and the director, who is also the producer and the star, does not want it to end. The Hollywood studio behind the film keeps feeding the script with new scenes, keeps adding millions of dollars to the budget. Early screen tests have proven it’s going to be a blockbuster, but only if they keep filming. And never stop.

Although it’s mostly just annoying, self-infantilisation’s pervasive existence in the culture could also be the harbinger of something more sinister. Last year, the comic book author Alan Moore suggested that the popularity of superhero films represents an “infantilisation that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true that a certain kind of kitsch infantilism was always a feature of Nazi art, which was hostile to moral ambiguity and formal complexity. Hitler himself was a Disney adult. If the desire to relinquish responsibility for your own life can be considered an infantile trait, it’s easy to see why this would make you more susceptible to authoritarianism. Today’s white nationalists – with their cartoon Pepes and their ‘frens’ – are as smooth-brain and babyish as any online community, while right-wing reactionaries have recently taken to eulogising 90s video games, Blockbuster and Toys R Us – a glorious past that has been robbed from us by wokeness.

In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.

The studios then fed their pictures first and exclusively to theaters they owned in competitive markets like New York, Chicago, and Boston. A caste system among theaters developed in which first-run pictures went to certain chains and second-run pictures—reruns, essentially—went to another tier of chains. In dealing with independent theater owners, distributors used the leverage of stars and major pictures to bundle their slate of minor pictures—for a theater owner to get the big blockbusters, he had to agree to show the harder-to-market films. The studio system’s purpose at every step was to smooth out the economics of an unpredictable business. The outcome was a functioning cartel.

The list of Hollywood blockbusters that conform to the hero’s journey paradigm is almost innumerable. Just off the top of my head? The Wizard of Oz; The Matrix; Jaws; the Star Wars films; Titanic; Braveheart; the Harry Potter series; Rocky; The Lord of the Rings; The Lion King; Finding Nemo; Forrest Gump; The Incredibles; Silence of the Lambs; Mulan; Gladiator; Aladdin; Indiana Jones; Beauty and the Beast; and Dances with Wolves/Avatar (watch them back-to-back).

Today it’s no secret that movie studios release blockbuster action films to meet the higher energy levels of summer audiences, more intellectual fare for the winter months, and romantic comedies for spring.

ORIGIN OF HOLLYWOOD On ride the masked men, wrapped in white sheets, bearing white crosses, torches held high: mounted avengers of the virtue of ladies and the honor of gentlemen strike fear into Negroes hungering for damsels’ white flesh. At the height of a wave of lynchings, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation sings a hymn of praise to the Ku Klux Klan. This is Hollywood’s first blockbuster and the greatest box office success ever for a silent movie. It is also the first film to ever open at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson gives it a standing ovation. Applauding it, he applauds himself: freedom’s famous flag-bearer wrote most of the texts that accompany the epic images. The president’s words explain that the emancipation of the slaves was “a veritable overthrow of Civilization in the South, the white South under the heel of the black South.” Ever since, chaos reigns because blacks are “men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.” But the president lights the lamp of hope: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan.” And even Jesus himself comes down from heaven at the end of the movie to give his blessing.

So, I need to reacquaint myself with this sort of celebrity person I seem to be. Someone who was in an iconic, blockbuster film called Star Wars.

Meanwhile back in the cinema, a staggering number of films still fail to meet the incredibly low standards of the Bechdel Test, which merely requires them to include two named female characters who talk to each other about any subject other than a man. According to the Bechdel website, recent failures to meet their ludicrously simple criteria include mainstream Hollywood blockbusters like The Internship, The Lone Ranger, The Avengers, Jack Reacher, Killer Joe, Men in Black III and Star Trek: Into Darkness (which should get a bonus point for an underwear scene so blatantly gratuitous even the writer subsequently saw fit to make a public apology for it). There is a feverish desperation to portray any young woman as a sexual object among a large swathe of the media that is so powerful as to transcend both relevance and respect. In the past year alone this rabid tunnel vision led to the portrayal of Amanda Thatcher (in mourning and speaking at her grandmother’s funeral), Amanda Knox (on trial for murder) and Reeta Steenkamp (a victim of domestic violence and murder) as sexual objects for mass consumption. All – regardless of their very different reasons for being in the spotlight – were paraded in countless photographs for the delectation of the tabloid readers.

Some viewed Chinese investors as the latest “dumb money” to hit Hollywood. It is no doubt true that financing movies is not the smartest way for any investor, from anywhere in the world, to earn the best returns. Others had a different theory—that some wealthy Chinese individuals and businesses were seeking to get their money out of China, where an autocratic government could still steal anyone’s wealth at any time, for any reason. Certainly Hollywood had long been a destination for legal money laundering. But those who worked most closely with the Chinese knew that the biggest reason for these investments was a form of reverse-colonialism. After more than a decade as a place for Hollywood to make money, China wanted to turn the tables. The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of “soft power,” whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons. Over the past few years, locally produced Chinese films had become more successful at the box office there. But most were culturally specific comedies and love stories that didn’t translate anywhere else. China had yet to produce a global blockbuster. And with box-office growth in that country slowing in 2016 and early 2017, hits that resonated internationally would be critical if the Communist nation was to grow its movie business and use it to become the kind of global power it wanted to be. So Chinese companies, with the backing of the government, started investing in Hollywood, with a mission to learn how experienced hands there made blockbusters that thrived worldwide. Within a few years, they figured, China would learn how to do that without anyone’s help. “Working with a company like Universal will help us elevate our skill set in moviemaking,” the head of the Chinese entertainment company Perfect World Pictures said, while investing $250 million in a slate of upcoming films from the American studio. Getting there wouldn’t be easy. One of the highest-profile efforts to produce a worldwide hit out of China was The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and made by Wanda’s Legendary Pictures. The $150 million film, about a war against monsters set on the Chinese historic landmark, grossed an underwhelming $171 million and a disastrous $45 million in the United States. Then, to create another obstacle, Chinese government currency controls established in early 2017 slowed, at least temporarily, the flow of money from China into Hollywood. But by then it was too late to turn back. As seemed to always be true when it came to Hollywood’s relationship with China, the Americans had no choice but to keep playing along. Nobody else was willing to pour billions of dollars into the struggling movie business in the mid-2010s, particularly for original or lower-budget productions.

Very beautiful things become harder to like the more we give ourselves over to the spectacular, sexy, shocking, ultra-sensual, fashionable art and ethics of Modernity. So far as acquiring good taste is concerned, balance is a myth. Every blockbuster film a man watches makes the task of reading Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre seem more dull and more pointless.

In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.